How to Tell If You Tore a Calf Muscle

A pain in your calf could be as minor as a sore muscle or as serious as a tear in the muscle. Learn how to tell the difference, and how to treat them accordingly, with the useful tips provided by a physical trainer in this free video on how to tell if you tore a calf muscle.

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Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Tanya Batts. I'm a personal trainer at Gold's Gym. How to tell if you tore a calf muscle. The things you will need for this are: a mat and some space. Well, there's going to be a lot of pain involved. You might get a serious cramp, maybe the spasms in the muscle. And it's just...and ways to check it out. Let's just say, okay you got, you hurt your calf. And things that can cause you to tear your calf muscle is kind of quick acceleration or maybe a switching of direction really quick. And let's just say your calf just wasn't ready for that switch. I am going to go down. So, let's just say I think I tore my calf muscle. I'm going to first thing you are probably going to hit the floor first off. So that's probably step one. You're down. Okay the next one is grab this calf. You want to massage it but if it hurts to touch it, you might have a little bit of a tear there. So and actually I'm going to come on down cause I just want to make sure and see what's going on. I'm coming down, greatest way to stretch your calf. Pitch your heel to the ceiling. If that really, really hurts chances are you got a tear. But if you've got a serious tear guys, you are going to have this calf muscle, it's going to be spasm. It's going to contract forcefully. Your toes, here's another step. If your toes ain't down, chances are you tore that muscle. And also another sure fire way to know you tore it, you are going to see blood pooling and bruising all around the ankle and the foot. Probably the bottom portion of the leg is where you are going to see most of the pooling right there. So you've probably torn that calf muscle. You do want to go to a doctor and there's 3 stages of calf tears. The first stage is kind of like a micro tear, just kind of partially torn. It's going to take about 2 weeks for you to recover. The second stage is like partial tearing. The third stage might be complete tearing. Might even require surgery. So, it's a good idea to go get checked out by a doctor but you might want to try wrapping it really tight. And see if that will help but those are just a few ways that you can really tell if you did tear your calf muscle.